Sunday, October 29, 2017

Secret Basement Lab Alphabet: T is for TERROR ON THE TRAIL



 T is for TERROR ON THE TRAIL


The fire finally blossomed like a cactus flower, orange and pink and dancing with the strokes of the evening breeze, and was just starting to melt away the chill of the desert as the bruise of night set and deepened from yellow and purple to deep, dark blue. Grant stoked the chunky ash beneath the kindling and watched the flames undulate, transfixed by their dance.
He had been three days off the beaten path, with not so much as a lost coach or a hungry coyote for company. Just scrub brush, pear cacti, and sand. And the heat. And after three days basting in his own sweat, having the desert filtered through his pores, sand sticking to the perspiration on his body so that his skin felt like roofing shingles, Grant was ready for a break.
And it was here in Whistling Valley that Grant broke. It was fitting, since the town seemed fairly broken itself. What remained left of the small community was a Main Street overgrown with scrub and sentried by dilapidated false fronts. The Red & Black Saloon, Gundersen’s General Store, First Bank of Whistling Valley—they were all masses of dust-tattooed boards, heat-cracked mortar and filthy, shattered glass. The wind played through the standing debris, producing a thin, blue whistle. However applicable the town’s moniker had been before it became a ghost town, it certainly, perhaps ironically, fit now.
Grant had made his bed in the livery, now a mess of probably-mouse-infested straw, under a warped canopy of shaggy wood beams. Just enough cover to hide himself, should the need arise, from any vagabonds whose curiosity may be piqued by his fire, and the necessary setup for retiring his horse for the night.
Grant wondered what made a town like Whistling Valley dry up and crack. Of course there were hundreds of small settlements between here and anywhere with the same story—miner hits ore, town blooms around lucrative mine, then turns into a ghost town once the mine collapses or its fecundity wanes. The same story dots the landscape from Minnesota to New Mexico: over-logged mill towns, over-mined mining towns, towns that dried up when their water supply did after a drought or became too polluted to use. And all that was left to memorialize Whistling Valley was a ramshackle, open-air sepulcher.
There was something different about this place, though, from the other empty carapaces of homesteads he’d traveled through. There was something unsettling about the boughs nailed to the front doors of the small, ramshackle homes, about the way the cross that would normally stand erect from the peak of the church roof like a mast on a ship, was snapped from its base and lying in the street.
Of course it could just simply be the product of a high wind.
After a meager meal and few hours of sleep, Grant woke. The whistling of the aptly named Whistling Valley, that he’d gotten used to. It took some hours of restlessly pulling his hat down over his face, as if making things even darker would somehow assuage his sleeplessness, but now there was a new sound. Something dry and jointed. It reminded him of the clack of knitting needles and of dim, lantern-lit evenings in Birch Creek, watching the darkness and the nodding shaggy heads of the pine trees while his mother busied herself so as not to think about his father—her husband.
Perhaps, he reasoned to himself, it’s the dry creak of the chains holding the general store sign to its pole above the business’s door. Or an animal scrounging around the junk-cluttered yard of a building looking for mice to eat.
No, it was an even beat. Like footsteps.
Perhaps this was a ghost town after all, in more than name.
Grant rose from his makeshift bed, brushing the straw from his clothing.
This was when he noticed that he’d just now noticed his horse was gone.
And then he saw…it. Standing in the street outside of the dilapidated saloon; it was a human skeleton, still patched with some mossy clumps of fetid human flesh, green and gray and dry as the dirt it should’ve been resting in. The creature tipped a glass bottle to its lips. Grant watched a surge of liquid, silver-by-moonlight, spurt from the bottleneck and splash through the empty, throat-less gullet.
It wore a holster on its hip.
Grant’s gun was in the saddlebag that had been strapped to Goldie, his horse. No chance of using that right now. Then again, he decided, it probably wouldn’t matter if he did have it. What possible use could a bullet be against something that was already dead?


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